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Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
The New American
May 30, 2013
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is currently on his nationwide "I'm probably running for president" tour. He's made the requisite stops in the early election states of Iowa and New Hampshire, courting the GOP faithful and bringing the figurative freezers full of red meat to throw their way. Demonstrating impressive political savvy, he's also making a habit of making bold statements that set him apart from potential Establishment competitors from both sides of the aisle.
He may be making the right rounds, shaking the right hands, and firing at the right targets, but if he's serious about being elected president, Senator Paul should join the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). At least that is the incredibly bad advice offered by Jacob Heilbrunn to the freshman senator and scion of the libertarian-leaning Paul family.
In an article published on May 19 in The National Interest — a foreign policy journal — senior editor Heilbrunn suggests not only that Paul "put as much distance between himself" and those who consider the CFR and its globalist policies to be a threat to liberty and U.S. sovereignty, but, "for good measure" he should add CFR president Richard N. Haass as a consigliore.
Here's Heilbrunn's pitch:
Nothing would signal that Paul intends to be a serious candidate for the presidency [more] than reaching out to mainstream Republicans such as Haass. Haass is the antithesis of a neoconservative, and it is neocons who, by and large, dominate the GOP, at least when it comes to setting the terms of debate. Whether they wield much influence outside it is a matter of debate. But as one of the avatars of shifting the debate on foreign policy, Paul would do well to broaden his message. Obviously, Paul is not going to abandon his libertarian credo. But it's hardly in conflict with tempering his message for a wider audience. His aim should be to present himself as a mainstream candidate espousing the revival of precepts that were successfully followed by GOP stalwarts such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush.
Broaden his message by appealing to the mainstream? That sounds like the none-too-successful strategy of several former GOP presidential contenders.
Beyond shilling for the perpetuation of the same-old-same-old, country club, Establishment partisan politics that have accelerated the decline of this country and its Constitution, Heilbrunn laments that Paul will hew too rigidly to the principles of civil libertarianism that are the essence of his broadening appeal.
And, speaking of that hoary Establishment claque, aren't they the same group that Senator Paul described as "stale and moss-covered" during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March?
Undaunted, after extolling Haass' experience in both Bush (older and younger) administrations, Heilbrunn makes his final appeal to Paul to demonstrate his presidential pragmatism by adopting Haass' worldview and promoting the CFR's foreign policy proposals.
Just what is the Council on Foreign Relations? Are they indeed "a secretive organization, the agent of nefarious bankers intent on promoting world government" as Heilbrunn mockingly says "the right" believes them to be?
Or, alternatively, are they, as Heilbrunn claims, a "network of realist thinkers with government experience and serious intellectual attainments"?
In truth, for decades since its creation, the Council on Foreign Relations has been the "mother ship" of the internationalist Establishment and the source of marching orders for the successive State Departments.
Perhaps the best evidence of the influence of this organization was revealed during a speech delivered at CFR headquarters in New York City in 2009, by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In her remarks, Clinton offered an accurate and chilling assessment of the relationship between the CFR and American foreign policymakers: "We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future."
How prevalent have members of the CFR been in the highest ranks of American politics?
The administrations of every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt have been filled with members of the CFR. From cabinet-level secretaries to the lowest-ranking sub-bureaucrat, presidents have turned to the CFR as the in-house personnel pool.
This path has been faithfully followed by every president — Republican or Democrat — including Barack Obama.
For a full and frightening account of the origin, purposes, and practices of the CFR, readers should turn to James Perloff's seminal book on the subject, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline. Originally published in 1988, the information provided by Perloff is timeless and timely.
What follows is a brief recitation of Perloff's account of the inception and influence of the CFR. This synopsis, taken from Perloff's article "Council on Foreign Relations: Influencing American Government" in the August 3, 2009 issue of The New American magazine, should serve as a primer for readers unfamiliar with the group, as well as a warning to Senator Paul to ignore the advice of Jacob Heilbrunn and anyone else who would see him abandon his constitutional conservatism in favor of the staid, secretive, sovereignty-eroding globalism of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Power Behind the Throne
In theory, America's government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, for the people." While this concept rang true in early America, and many individuals still trust in it, the last century has seen the reality of power increasingly shift from the people to an establishment rooted in banking, Wall Street, and powerful multinational corporations. Syndicated columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt, granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, explained:
The word "Establishment" is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions and government, largely from the northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the White House. Most people are unaware of the existence of this "legitimate Mafia." Yet the power of the Establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or State Department job. It affects the nation's policies in almost every area.
Roosevelt added that this group's goal is "a One World Socialist state governed by 'experts' like themselves." David Rockefeller, the longtime chairman (and now chairman emeritus) of the CFR, acknowledged the role of the establishment in trying to lead America in the one-world direction in his 2002 book Memoirs:
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
Two major means the establishment employs for controlling government policy: (1) through its influence within the two major parties and the mass media, it can usually assure that both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates will be its own hand-picked men; (2) by stacking presidential cabinets with CFR members at key positions — especially those involving defense, finance, foreign policy, and national security — it can assure that America will move in the direction it wants.
Since the council's founding in 1921, 21 secretaries of defense or war, 19 secretaries of the treasury, 17 secretaries of state, and 15 CIA directors have hailed from the Council on Foreign Relations.
Prior to the CFR's founding, what Congressman Charles Lindbergh, Sr. (the father of the famous aviator) called the "Money Trust" — a cabal of international bankers including the houses of Rockefeller, Morgan, and Rothschild — conspired to create the Federal Reserve System. Their agents, such as Paul Warburg and Benjamin Strong, who had secretly planned the Fed at a nine-day meeting on Jekyll Island, were then put in charge of the system itself. This gave them control of American interest rates, and, by virtue of this, control of the stock market, as well as the capacity to have the U.S. government spend without limit by having the Fed create money from nothing. The result has been decades of inflation and skyrocketing national debt. Not just an accumulation of wealth, but a consolidation of political power was involved.
The Money Trust had backed Woodrow Wilson in the presidential elections, and then controlled him through their front man, Edward Mandell House, who lived in the White House. The trust recognized how the power of government could be used to advance their own interests. Wilson, surrounded by the bankers, traveled to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which was settling the aftermath of World War I.
His chief proposal there, of course, was the League of Nations — a first step toward world government. However, although the League was established by the Versailles Treaty, the United States did not join because the Senate refused to ratify the treaty. In response to this rejection, the bankers' circle, still in Paris, held a series of meetings and proposed to establish a new organization in the United States, whose purpose would be to lead America into the League. This organization was incorporated in New York City two years later as the Council on Foreign Relations.
Architects of a New World Order
The CFR's goal was formation of an incrementally stronger world government. Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate of the U.S. Navy, was a CFR member for 16 years before resigning in disgust. He stated: "The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence, and submergence into an all-powerful one-world government." After World War II, the League's successor, the United Nations, was born.
Contrary to what the public is commonly told, the UN was not founded by nations who had tired of war. The UN was conceived by a group of CFR members in the State Department calling themselves the Informal Agenda Group. They drafted the original proposal for the UN, and secured the approval of President Roosevelt, who then made establishing the UN his highest postwar priority. When the UN held its founding meeting in San Francisco in 1945, 47 of the American delegates were CFR members.
Though the UN was not initially set up as a world government, the intent was that it would develop into one over time. John Foster Dulles (CFR), an American delegate to the UN founding meeting who later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower, acknowledged as much in his book War or Peace: "The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization."
Again, Perloff's book The Shadows of Power relates so much more of the destructive effect of CFR influence.
Going forward, one thing is certain, as Perloff wrote in the aforementioned article:
As long as the CFR controls our government, we can anticipate more of the same: diminishing national sovereignty; free flow of immigration (which confuses national identity and weakens national loyalties); increasing jobs losses through multinational trade agreements; further internationalization of law (Law of the Sea Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, World Court, global taxation, etc.); increasing loss of freedoms in a "surveillance society"; progressive organization of the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union; and ultimately, broader merger into a world government where all power will be concentrated in the hands of the elite.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Deanna Isaacs reports in The Reader this week that Flatfile Galleries will close their doors on March 27. This comes on the heels of Rowland Contemporary's demise last December. Are these the first of many deaths to come? Most likely. But there's a bright side to this undeniably sad news, and it lies in Chicago's thriving apartment and alternative gallery scene. Although I haven't been living in these parts for long, and I'm definitely still feeling my way around, it seems to me that Chicago's art world is uniquely primed not only to weather these disastrous economic times but to thrive in the midst of them. Now, I'm not trying to get all Holland Carter on your asses (see Carter's Feb. 15th essay in the New York Times for what I'm referring to; earlier this week New York magazine writer Alexandra Peers offered a gloomier rebuttal of Carter's sunny outlook for recession-era art). My point is that Chicago's artists, indie curators and writers have been doing their own thing for a long time: running tiny galleries and think-tank type workshops out of spare rooms in their homes and apartments, creating flexible art and cultural storefront spaces whose content isn't solely object- or market-driven–eh, you're all BAS listeners, you don't need me to tell you this. I'm not denying that a crap art market has seriously bad ripple effects on everyone; but in these times the Chicago art world–especially the one that's a bit harder to find and is usually only open on Saturdays, Sundays, or by appointment–offers a powerful and creative model of how to carry on with the business of art when the art business is going down the tubes. I, for one, am glad I'm here right now.
- Michelle Grabner, Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer Named Curators of 2014 Whitney Biennial - November 29, 2012
- New Fielding Practice Podcast on the Art21 Blog! Episode 16: Summer Review-O-Rama! - July 19, 2012
- Tom Sanford is a Busy Man…Here's Why - June 12, 2012

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Dorit LeviFollow this Artist
"Lyrical Ensemble with Remarque 2006"2006
Limited Edition Print : Hand Embellished Serigraph with Gold Leaf
Size : 39.75x29.75 in | 101x76 cm
Edition :STEAL THIS
Hand Signed : Double hand signed in ink with remarque
Condition : Mint
Not Framed
Certificate of Authenticity : Art Brokerage
Dorit Levi - Israel
Art Brokerage: Dorit Levi Israeli Artist: b. 1952. The artist Dorit Levi has a special and unique style all her own. The flow of color and images the joy of life, and the movement of figures create a wondrous image for the viewer. Although each work has the clear mark of Dorit, in ther works one can see the influence of Bolivian artist Boulanger as well as cubists Leger, and Braque. Dorit Levi was born in 1952 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the culture and tradition of her home can be seen in her work. Dorit Levi's extraordinary talent brought her to study at the prestigious Wizco France art Scool also located in Tel Aviv. There she was the dedicated student of one of Israel's greatest artist, Edwin Salomon. Dorit Levi's works are remarkable in her use of gold leaf and the enormous attention to detail and complex composition. Each time one looks at a Dorit Levi painting new aspects and new configurations are discovered. The works of Dorit Levi are on display in various galleries and collections throughout the world, attesting to her exceptional talent. Dorit Levi's works can be found in Israel, the United States, Canada, France, and Japan. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.


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Dwight Howard leaves Lakers eyeing rebirth with Rockets
- Dwight Howard ended his Lakers tenure after one year by joining the Rockets
- Howard believed teaming with James Harden gave him the best chance to win now
- Howard left %2430 million on the table to pursue his stated goal%3A %22Be an icon%22
The list in Dwight Howard's Bel Air bedroom won out after all, that totem pole of tasks that began with the one that inspired him to join the Houston Rockets.
"1. Shall come to pass that the Lakers will be the 2012-13 champs," the paper that was taped on his mirror read.
All the noise about his warped priorities, all those signs that he cared more about his business than his basketball, and Howard got it right in the end by chasing the one dream so many wondered if he cared about anymore: a championship. This was a "Dwightmare" at almost every turn, from the Orlando chapter gone wrong to drama in Laker Land that started at the outset and seemed to never stop.
Even with the scorched earth he left behind in Los Angeles, where the Lakers are so unaccustomed to being left at the altar when it comes to the game's greats, Howard put only one thing first: winning. He wanted to win and win now. And that meant joining James Harden & Co. to give it a go.
That option wasn't quite so clear anywhere else, not with the aging Dirk Nowitzki and an unclear roster in Dallas, the overbearing Kobe Bryant and overhyped roster with the Lakers, the wide-open roster in Atlanta or the intriguing but complicated situation with Golden State. And so Howard joined the Rockets, heading for Houston with the hopes of restarting his mission after the Lakers' awful 2012-13 campaign in which they went 45-37 and were swept by San Antonio first the first round of the playoffs.
There was none of his now-infamous waffling this time, either. Howard made his decision, first reported by USA TODAY Sports, before boarding a plane in Colorado headed back to Los Angeles, where he intended all along to inform the Lakers and announce his destination via Twitter.
He would eventually do just that, changing the jersey on his Twitter avatar to Rockets garb and sharing his enthusiastic thoughts not long after the Lakers' general manager announced Howard would not return.
Reactions were swift on social media, and former teammates Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol quickly unfollowed Howard on Twitter.
But there should be no backlash, not with the indisputable reality that Howard is accepting $30 million less in order to chase a championship in a market that does less for his personal brand. Howard picked the right to-do list that hung on his mirror, ignoring – at least for now – the one that hung near the list of on-court goals and reads "Be an icon. Be iconic."
He may or may not reach that status with the Rockets, where Yao Ming certainly proved that global acclaim is possible outside New York, Chicago or LA. Howard may or may not win a title, what with the Miami Heat stubbornly standing their ground and so much parity in the league.
But he will be a happier, healthier version of himself than the one we saw in that disastrous trial run in Hollywood. Onward and upward it is for Howard, then. His road to redemption has officially begun.


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A Pro-Russian rebel walks in a passage at the local market damaged by shelling in Petrovskiy district of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Aug. 26, 2014.
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Italian actress Cristina Capotondi attends the red carpet for the movie "La Rancon de la Gloire" (The Price of Fame) at the 71st Venice Film Festival Aug. 28, 2014.
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A Pro-Russian separatist stands near the damaged war memorial at Savur-Mohyla, a hill east of the city of Donetsk, Aug. 28, 2014. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday that Russian forces had entered his country and the military conflict was worsening after Russian-backed separatists swept into a key town in the east.
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Tianna Bartoletta of the U.S. competes in the women's long jump event during the Weltklasse Diamond League meeting at the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich, Switzerland, Aug. 28, 2014.
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In this Aug. 27, 2014 photo, a sole clown shoe belonging to Honduran migrant Jorge Ruiz Williams, 20, lies atop a freight train after it arrived at the station in Ixtepec, Mexico.
Migrants who had been riding atop the train from Arriaga to Ixtepec reported that authorities staged a raid on the train in the middle of the night, arresting many migrants and sending others fleeing into the darkness. Williams was able to escape the police and re-board the train. Seen later in a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, he said he had lost both shoes, but the rest of his professional clown costume was intact.
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Metal boards in the shape of gunmen sit on an old bunker at an observation point on Mt. Bental in the Israeli controlled Golan Heights, overlooking the border with Syria near the Quneitra province, Aug. 29, 2014.
An armed group detained more than 40 U.N. peacekeepers during fighting in Syria early Thursday and over 80 peacekeepers were trapped, the United Nations said.
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Oklahoma City police officer Sgt. Ryan Stark, center, leans over the casket of his canine partner, K-9 Kye, following funeral services for the dog in Oklahoma City, Okla., Aug. 28, 2014. K-9 Kye, a 3-year-old Belgian German Shepard, died Aug. 25 after being stabbed by a burglary suspect on Aug. 24. Sgt. Stark tried to separate the dog and the suspect before fatally shooting the suspect.
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A vendor arranges cheap Chinese shoes for sale on the pavement in Hanoi, Aug. 21, 2014. Vietnamese deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, quoted by official media, has asked to strengthen the fight against fake, smuggled goods, as well as smuggling activities through the land and sea borders.
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Local children lie in the grass as they watch historical society members fire five volleys of a cannon at the inauguration ceremony of a monument to honor members of the British Cheshire Regiment and other soldiers who died fighting the German Army exactly 100 years before at the same site during World War I in Audregnies, Belgium, Aug. 24, 2014.
Of the 25 officers and 925 men of the 1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment who fought that day on August 24, 1914, only a total of 207 would survive after two messengers with instructions for the unit to retreat failed to make it through. The battle came on the heels of the Battle of Mons the day before, which was the first major engagmement between British and German forces in the war. The British, French and Belgian armies were forced to continue their retreat until weeks later, when only a short distance from Paris they managed to reverse the tide of the war and push the Germans back north.
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Performers parade through the streets during the Notting Hill Carnival in London, England, Aug. 24, 2014. The Notting Hill Carnival is the largest street festival in Europe and was first held in 1964 by the Afro-Caribbean community.
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Ahmed Kenzi Saidia of Algeria, center, competes in Men's 2000m Steeplechase Final of Nanjing 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games at the Nanjing Olympic Sports Center in Nanjing, China, Aug. 25, 2014.
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Tourists view Hukou Waterfall in China, Aug. 24, 2014. It is the largest waterfall on the Yellow River, China, and the second largest waterfall in China.
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A riot policeman is set on fire by a molotov cocktail thrown by a small group of anti-government protesters during clashes in San Cristobal, Venezuela, Aug. 25, 2014. The demonstrators protested against the rise in public transportation costs, the shortage of goods and the closure of the border with Colombia, among other things.
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Cellar worker Adam Craig moves a wine barrel as he cleans up a pile of collapsed barrels in a storage room at Kieu Hoang Winery in Napa, California, Aug. 25, 2014. A day after a 6.0 earthquake rocked the Napa Valley, residents and wineries were continuing clean up operations.
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Six thousand fans of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, gather to form a giant Ataturk portrait at Ataturk's mausoleum, in Ankara, Aug. 26, 2014.
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In this composite image Chinese women pose in face-kinis in the Yellow Sea in Qingdao, China, Aug. 21, 2014. The locally designed mask is worn by many local women to protect them from jellyfish stings, algae and the sun's ultraviolet rays.
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A child runs through a park along Manhattan's East River in New York City, Aug. 27, 2014.
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Workers decorate Tiananmen Square for the 65th Anniversary of The People's Republic of China in Beijing, China, Aug. 27, 2014. The National Day of the People's Republic of China is celebrated every year on October 1, and it will be the 65th Anniversary this year.
Footsteps from recent visitors are visible among the remains of a former French communications and supply trench from the World War I Battle of Verdun near Verdun, France, Aug. 27, 2014. The 10-month Battle of Verdun in 1916, among the most horrific on the entire Western Front, resulted in a combined casualty count of between 714,231 and 976,000 for both sides. The two armies fired an estimated 65 million artillery shells at one another, of which millions never exploded and are still strewn throughout the region.
France will commemorate the centenary of the battle in 2016 with events including the inauguration of a redesigned national memorial.
Company of the HMS Illustrious stand in formation during her decommissioning ceremony in Portsmouth, England, Aug. 28, 2014. The HMS Illustrious was the last of the Royal Navy's Invincible class aircraft carriers, and is to be replaced by HMS Ocean after serving for 32 years. The ship is to be sold with the condition that the buyer must keep HMS Illustrious in Great Britain.
Horses and riders clear a fence in The £500 Permanent Money Backs Handicap Steeple Chase at Fontwell racecourse in Fontwell, England, Aug. 28, 2014.
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People hold a photograph of James Foley, the freelance journalist killed by the ISIS group, during a memorial service in Erbil, 220 miles north of Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 24, 2014.
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Ron Mcgee, bottom, and Shawn Williams, top, sunbathe on a float in a shallow tidal pool on the South Beach of Tybee Island, Ga., Aug. 23, 2014. The National Weather Service had issued a heat advisory in south Georgia.
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Beyonce performs on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Aug. 24, 2014.
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San Diego Padres' Will Venable grounds out while batting against the Milwaukee Brewers during the second inning in a baseball game in San Diego, Aug. 27, 2014.
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A cat runs on the pitch during a Spanish La Liga soccer match between FC Barcelona and Elche at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 24, 2014.
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Ukrainian soldiers park their hardware on the roadside as they wait for the start of the march into the town of Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, Aug. 27, 2014.
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Children from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, wait for food by a fire in Bajed Kadal refugee camp, southwest of Dohuk province, Aug. 22, 2014.
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A view of what witnesses said was an explosion caused by an Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City, Aug. 23, 2014.
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Protesters are seen below mounted police during a demonstration against an election meeting organized by right-wing political group The Party of the Swedes (Svenskarnas Parti) in central Malmo, southern Sweden, August 23, 2014. Two people were hurt during the demonstration, according to local media.
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Shi'ite fighters loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who have joined the Iraqi army to fight against ISIS militants take part in field training in Najaf, Aug. 23, 2014.
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Palestinians look at the remains of a commercial center, which witnesses said was hit by an Israeli air strike on Saturday, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Aug. 24, 2014.
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Female Afghan National Army (ANA) officers attend their graduation ceremony at the Kabul Military Training Centre in Afghanistan, Aug. 24, 2014.
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A man holds up a knife as he rides on the back of a motorcycle touring the streets of Tabqa city with others in celebration after ISIS militants took over Tabqa air base, in nearby Raqqa city, Syria, Aug. 24, 2014. ISIS militants stormed the air base in northeast Syria on Sunday, capturing most of it from government forces after days of fighting over the strategic location, a monitoring group said. Fighting raged inside the walls of the Tabqa air base, the Syrian army's last foothold in an area otherwise controlled by ISIS, which has seized large areas of Syria and Iraq.
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A man slips off the "gostra," a pole covered in grease, during the week-long celebrations for the religious feast of St Julian, patron of the town of St. Julian's, outside Valletta, Malta, Aug. 24, 2014. In the traditional " game stretching back to the Middle Ages, young men, women and children have to make their way to the top of a pole and try to uproot one of the flags to win prizes.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel embraces the statue of Saint James during her visit to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Aug. 25, 2014.
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Britain's Josh Collins riding "Spook a Little" competes in the team reining competition at the World Equestrian Games at the d'Ornano stadium in Caen, France, Aug. 25, 2014.
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French President Francois Hollande delivers a speech in the rain on the Ile de Sein, an island located near the Pointe-du-Raz, off the Brittany coast, in France, Aug. 25, 2014. Earlier in the day, Hollande asked his prime minister to form a new government, looking to impose his will on the cabinet after rebel leftist ministers had called for an economic policy U-turn. The surprise move came the day after the outspoken Economy Minister had condemned what he called fiscal "austerity" and attacked euro zone powerhouse Germany's "obsession" with budgetary rigor.
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Manchester City's goalkeeper Joe Hart, center, punches the ball away from Liverpool's Martin Skrtel, left, and Dejan Lovren, right, during their English Premier League soccer match at the Etihad stadium in Manchester, England, Aug. 25, 2014.
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Men in suits lock hands to make a clear path for family members attending the funeral of Michael Brown, at Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis, Mo., Aug. 25, 2014. The father of Brown, the black teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. on August 9, appealed for calm as family, politicians and activists gathered for the funeral following weeks of unrest.
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Michael Brown Sr. yells out as his son's casket is lowered into the ground at St. Peter's Cemetery in St. Louis, Mo., Aug. 25, 2014. Family, politicians and activists gathered for the funeral on Monday following weeks of unrest with at times violent protests spawning headlines around the world focusing attention on racial issues in the United States.
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A woman reacts as she embraces her son, who joined as a new volunteer of the Ukrainian interior ministry's special battalion "Sich", before a ceremony, where he and his comrades will take an oath of allegiance to the country, in Kiev, Ukraine, Aug. 26, 2014.
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Coffins containing bodies of migrants who died are carried off a navy ship at the Sicilian harbor of Augusta, Aug. 26, 2014. At least 24 migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa died after their boat sank in the Mediterranean, the Italian navy said after completing a two-day search for bodies. A further 364 migrants were rescued by navy and coastguard vessels after the fishing boat capsized, the latest in a series of similar shipwrecks.
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Palestinian children hold guns as they celebrate with others what they said was a victory over Israel, following a ceasefire in Gaza City, Aug. 26, 2014. Israel has accepted an Egyptian proposal for a Gaza ceasefire, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday.
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Michael Lucarelli runs from the media as he leaves the federal court building in Manhattan after posting bail, Aug. 26, 2014. Lucarelli, the director of market intelligence at Lippert/Heilshorn & Associates, was arrested at his Manhattan apartment, a spokesman for the FBI said. A criminal complaint made public in federal court charged Lucarelli with 13 counts of securities fraud for making investments based on press releases his company drafted.
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Actor Dachi Orvelashvili poses during the photo call for the movie "The President" at the 71st Venice Film Festival, Aug. 27, 2014.
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Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano erupts near Banos, Aug. 24, 2014. Tungurahua, which means "Throat of Fire" in the local Quechua language, has been classified as active since 1999.
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A surfer flies off a wave at the Wedge in Newport Beach, Calif., Aug. 27, 2014. Southern California beachgoers experienced much higher than normal surf, brought on by Hurricane Marie spinning off the coast of Mexico.
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Sturm Ruger CEO says gunmaker has no plans to leave Fairfield base
Some firearms manufacturers have threatened to leave Connecticut in response to tougher new gun legislation, but Sturm Ruger in Fairfield is not one of them.
The company, based in the Southport section of town, saw a boost in sales in the first quarter and has no plans to leave the state, Michael Fifer, president and chief executive officer, told a company annual stockholder meeting Tuesday in Prescott, Ariz. The comments were broadcast on the company's web site.
"Consumers ask us why we are in Connecticut and why do you support a state that doesn't support you? We've got good engineers and a small headquarters there. I'm not going to disrupt those people and move out," Fifer said, adding that he will continue to push gun rights in dealings with state officials.
However, Sturm Ruger, which reported sales jumped to $155.9 million from $112.3 million in the first quarter of 2012, does plan to expand its workforce and operations outside of the state.
"We are still hiring engineers to staff new worthwhile projects. I believe there are new opportunities for Ruger in new products," Fifer said, noting that the company has grown from 1,300 employees in 2006 to 2,100 employees today. "I'd take 18 more mechanical engineers this afternoon. We've got some great projects. If you've got some great engineers that love guns, send them my way."
Fifer's comments came as good news to Mark Barnhart, Fairfield's community and economic development director, who said moving a business is a challenge, partly because of employees' attachment to a community.
"It's often what a company has to wrestle with. They have an investment in their people. They have less than 50 people (at the 1 Lacey Place headquarters), but they've been around many years and have been a good corporate citizen," said Barnhart, adding that Sturm Ruger owns its headquarters building. "They maintain a low profile. You can drive down the Post Road and past Lacey Place and not see their building."
The company, which offers more than 30 firearms lines, is considering establishing a third manufacturing location -- in addition to its plants in Arizona and New Hampshire -- to increase production.
"We're actively seeking a third manufacturing facility -- about 250,000 square feet," Fifer said. "We're looking for a beautiful building that someone has abandoned. I need more square feet for new products. We're not talking about moving jobs out of New Hampshire or Arizona."
New product introductions were a significant component of Sturm Ruger's sales growth as new product sales in the first quarter, representing $53.3 million, or 35 percent, of firearm sales. New product introductions in the first quarter included the LC380 pistol and the SR45 pistol.
"Our earnings increased 53 percent from the first quarter of 2012, driven by the 39 percent growth in sales and our ongoing focus on continuous improvement in our operations," said Fifer, whose company was ranked by Forbes at No. 4 on its America's Best Small Companies list with a market cap of $848 million, based on information as of October 2012.
Ruger's net income climbed to $23.7 million, or $1.20 per diluted share, in the most recent quarter, compared with $15.5 million, or 79 cents a share, for the same period a year ago.
The company's board of directors declared a dividend of 49 cents per share for the first quarter.
Fifer defended Ruger's position as a firearms manufacturer and its support of efforts to encourage legislators in states to re-consider wording in the new gun legislation, which was passed in response to the December rampage-shooting murder of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
A spokesman for Gov. Dannel Malloy declined to comment, referring to a March 6 letter the governor wrote to Connecticut's gun makers, stating that his proposals were common sense ideas to combat gun violence.
"I know that if enacted, my proposals, as well as the plans put forth by the General Assembly, could have an impact on your business," Malloy wrote. "I recognize that there are differences between us, but it is my hope that you will continue to stay in our state so that we can continue to have an open and honest dialogue."
Some states passed legislation in haste, resulting in action that was not fully considered, Fifer said, recalling that New York's legislature had to rewrite approved legislation that regulated the size of gun clips.
"Our biggest concern is at the state level to try to address foolish legislation," Fifer said, supporting efforts by the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation to confront the issue.
NSSF President Steve Sanetti has met with several media organizations to discuss gun-control issues. Among his topics has been Connecticut manufacturers and the state's new gun legislation. The organization has chastised Malloy for what it said is "a slanderous attack on the gun industry."
FBI statistics supplied by the NSSF that track firearm background checks show a steady climb since March 2010, when 1.3 million checks were recorded. In March, some 2.3 million checks were recorded, indicating an increase in gun sales.
There are no industry-wide statistics on gun sales, said NSSF spokesman Bill Brassard Jr.
Ruger's shares rose 0.6 percent Tuesday to $51.27. They have gained 0.5 percent in the last year.


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Cook the Book: 'Fat'
Overflowing with crunchy breadsticks, oven-fresh focaccia, and an assortment of rolls, the basket comes not only with butter but also with a small tureen of whipped lardo. That's right. Pork fat. It's surprisingly light, incredibly flavorful, and absolutely delicious. While the basket would still be very good without it, the whipped lardo adds an extraspecial element that raises the once-humble offering of bread to luxurious new heights. Ed Levine agrees with me, naming Del Posto's bread basket "perhaps my favorite lunch or dinner bread basket anywhere."
Jennifer McLagan, chef and award-winning cookbook author, believes that the food industry has "demonized" fat; wrongly labeling it a "greasy killer," when in fact it has been an integral part of our diet for centuries. To combat this notion, she has written the ultimate book on the subject: Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. With chapters devoted to butter, pork, poultry, beef and lamb fats, and more than 100 recipes for dishes such as duck fat french fries and bacon baklava, Jennifer sets out to cure us of our fat phobia.
Simply put, Jennifer loves fat, "whether it's a slice of foie gras terrine…French butter from Normandy…hot bacon fat…or a piece of crunchy pork crackling, delicious either hot or cold. Fat is as much an homage as it is a collection of recipes: the photos are coffee table-worthy, and the pages are sprinkled here and there with proverbs and quotes ("If you are afraid of butter, as many people are nowadays, just put in cream" —Julia Child).
Win 'Fat'
In addition to excerpting a recipe each day this week, we're also giving away copies of Fat to five (5) lucky readers. To enter for a chance to win, simply answer this question in the comments section below: What is your favorite dish to prepare in which fat is an important ingredient?
Five (5) people will be chosen at random from eligible comments below. Comments will close Monday, October 20 at noon ET. The standard Serious Eats contest rules apply.
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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We had only known Paul Hiltz and his buddy for a couple of hours, so we thought they were kidding when Hay Island came into view. "See all those grey things?" Hiltz asks, pointing to what we figured were hundreds of big rocks. "Those are seals."
First, let's address the issue of cuteness.
A full-grown grey seal is bigger than any fat man you know, and when you walk up to one, it bares its teeth and makes a noise like the snoring that follows a dozen beer.
They defecate prodigiously.
Hay Island is an hour's trip from Main-a-Dieu in Cape Breton by lobster boat, and during our visit in mid-February, it was populated by thousands of seals.
The only ones with white fur were small pups that were stillborn or had died shortly after they were born. Bald eagles and seagulls had picked clean the meat from their heads, so their skulls were almost as bright as their frozen bodies.
The fur on a newborn grey seal turns from white to brown or mottled less than a month after birth.
"There's a nice one," Hiltz says of a seal as he walked the island, which we judged to be about the size of Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, although without a single tree.
"That one would make a nice mat."
In the spring, it will be lobster season for the fishermen of Main-a-Dieu, who, at other times of the year, supplement their living by dragging for scallops or diving for sea urchins.
Hiltz is also a seal hunter. Or rather, was a seal hunter. Once part of a crew that harvested 400 seals on Hay Island in a single day, he hasn't been on a hunt in three years. The market for seal products has all but disappeared.
"Why is it all right to kill cows and chickens, but not seals?" he asks. "I can't figure that out."
Wayne Denny, fishery director with the Pictou Landing First Nation, has the same question. Three members of his band used to take a few hundred seals each winter, Denny says.
"They saved the fins, and when they got to the shore, there was piles of people coming out looking for the (flippers), so they would just give them away."
Not enough people eat seal flipper pie to make a hunt worthwhile. A deal to sell seal meat to China is in diplomatic and bureaucratic limbo, and international opposition to the hunt has virtually elim-inated fur demand.
Denny, who once tried to sell seal meat for use as lobster bait, says seals are so plentiful they are a nuisance.
"It stopped in Pictou Landing because there was no market out there. There were so many countries protesting and stuff like that, no matter where you wanted to send it. I tried to get a company in Cape Breton to buy them, to use as lobster bait or whatever, but a lot of people were saying they wouldn't buy the lobsters if they were going to use the seal bait.
"I'll tell you right now, when we set our nets for salmon or herring or whatever, you have seals everywhere. Grey seals. You can go to Merigomish Harbour. Before, you wouldn't even see one; now you go (and) you see about 20 of them.
"If there was a market, there'd be a seal hunt. The seals are flourishing. They're all over the place."
Robert Courtney thinks flourishing is an understatement as a description of the winter population of Pictou Island grey seals, which he pegs at 15,000, compared with maybe 3,000 on Hay Island.
Courtney, who represents Nova Scotia sealers and has four decades of hunt experience here and in Newfoundland and Labrador, remembers years they killed so many seals they burned blubber for heat in their sheds while working on fishing gear.
He hopes he hasn't put away "the bat," a club used to kill seals, for the last time.
"It will not go on as in the past," Courtney concedes. "But we might be able to muster enough together for a small market. It's not going to be two or three hundred thousand. It's going to be a very small hunt in the harps, and small or nothing in the greys."
Animal rights activists will tell you the seal hunt, apart from being cruel and inhumane, is irrelevant economically. That may be true on a macro level, but to an individual fisherman such as Hiltz, with four kids, macro is a word for a university economics class.
"People, in the past, have made $10,000, $15,000, in a couple of weeks," Courtney says. "Very worthwhile. But, right now, the price is down to the bottom, and the way things are, we can't get rid of what we can harvest.
"Not that many years ago, they got $105 an animal, per pelt. You figure that up, and that's quite a bit of money. And you can (hunt) with eight, 10 people. You do the math. It'll tell you how lucrative it can be."
Not many issues are as polarizing as the seal hunt, with sealers on one side and animal rights activists on the other, each with considerable loathing for each other, each keeping some contempt in reserve for the government and its attempts to regulate the industry.
Courtney dismisses the activists as meddlers who have found a much easier way to make a living than travelling to ice floes or frozen islands and skinning seals.
In his mind, anti-sealers are just like many people, motivated by money.
"They're not worried about the ecosystem they're only worried about creating a controversy, getting it in the media, getting every-thing all blown out of proportion and getting the little old ladies to open up their purse and send donations to them.
"They mislead the public. We haven't harvested any whitecoats for the last 25 years, but they keep showing the cute little baby whitecoat. Show the pictures of today, show the big animals. The cute and cuddly little grey seal lives to be 34 to 38 years old, so you imagine what it has to consume to grow to the size that it is, and to live that long. You're talking about a population that's increasing by 12 per cent per year."
Who knows what was going through the mind of whoever clubbed dozens of seal pups to death on an eastern Prince Edward Island beach this winter and left the bodies to freeze?
If the killer was trying to advance the notion that there are too many seals eating too much fish, the message was lost, says Dr. Pierre-Yves Daoust, a veterinarian at the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown and a veteran seal hunt observer.
Slaughtering 50 animals that are part of a population of 300,000 is a futile gesture, and leaving the carcasses to freeze invites scorn, Daoust says. "It's easy for the animal rights people to say 'Look, people in fishing communities have no respect for the animals. How can you expect a sealer who is often a fisherman to have respect for the animal?'"
He thinks the day may come when Atlantic Canadian seal products are exported forconsumption to China, but only if Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency get fully on board.
"If you want to market some of those products for oil or for meat, you need to have CFIA actively engaged in it, and CFIA is engaged, but perhaps in not as consistent a manner as I would like to see, because these things take a long time to develop.
"There was some discussion about promoting the consumption of seal meat in our own country. Will this ever happen? Well, that's where it should start consuming a resource that is totally sustainable. Before looking at the Chinese market, maybe we should promote the use of this product here, in our country, and I'm a firm believer in that."
In 1969, the International Fund for Animal Welfare was founded to oppose the commercial seal hunt. By any measure, it has been staggeringly successful, most recently welcoming Taiwan to a list of over 30 countries that ban seal product imports.
Locally, Bridget Curran is at the forefront of seal hunt opposition as spokeswoman and director of Atlantic Canadian Anti-Sealing Coalition. To Curran, who has spent four years documenting the Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador hunts, it is clear: the seal hunt is dead. She points to figures that show the value of seal product exports decreasing by almost 90 per cent from 2007 to 2011.
"In terms of markets closing, which goes hand in hand with the dramatic drop in profits, country after country are closing their doors to seal products.
"There's been a lot of propaganda put forth by the government and by the sealing industry over many years. The anti-sealing campaign is one of documentation, and one of public education. We've been debunking the myth of the government and the sealing industry that the seal hunt is humane. It's not economically important, it's not ecologically sound and it's completely unnecessary."
Curran describes it as an intentional muddying of the issue to condemn the anti-sealing lobby for putting the interests of seals ahead of humans.
"That's a common accusation that we get; we're told if you eat cows and chickens, then you have no business being concerned about seals. By the same token, these people will say if you're a vegetarian, then you're a radical. So if you're not a vegetarian, you're a hypocrite, and if you are a vegetarian or vegan, then you're a radical.
"There's no credible science to show that seals need to be killed to aid in fish-stock recovery. It's not just a bunch of crazy vegans, 'How dare you kill the cute little seals?' It's not that at all. There's a wide cross-section (of people).
"Sealers themselves are actually starting to say that maybe a licence buyback would be a good idea. When people involved in the industry are starting to say themselves that it's over that's a clear sign that it's over. So, yes, the sealing industry is definitely dead."
Source: HERALD MAGAZINE
Editorial: SELVA-Vida Sin Fronteras
Editorial Committee
David Dunham
Arno Ambrosius
Gustavo López Ospina
Mariana Almeida
Pieter Jan Brouwer
Assistant: Emilia Romero
The Amazon Pink Dolphin's Voice is associated with the International Environmental Mission, a grass roots citizens movement created by Chilean Senator Juan Pablo Letelier.
SELVA Vida Sin Fronteras acknowledges Kevin Schafer's important contribution towards protecting the highly endangered Amazon pink fresh water dolphin. Title photographs of our "The Amazon Pink Dolphin's Voice" were taken by Mr. Schafer.


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GameStop pops despite lousy resultsNovember 15, 2012: 12:39 PM ET
Investors appear to be betting on a Christmas miracle for GameStop.
Shares of the video game retailer were up nearly 5% in morning trading Thursday, despite a less-than-stellar quarterly report.
GameStop (GME) said it lost $624.3 million in the third quarter, while global sales declined nearly 9%.
But the company's "adjusted" results came in better than expected. Excluding certain charges, GameStop said it earned 38 cents per share, topping analysts' forecasts by 6 cents.
GameStop also maintained its outlook for full-year profits, saying it expects to report earnings per share of between $3.10 and $3.30, excluding charges. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect $3.14 per share for the year.
The holiday season is when most retailers move into the black for the year, and video games are a big hit with the kids these days. That should be good news for GameStop, as well as game makers Electronic Arts (EA) and Activision Blizzard (ATVI).
Yet many investors on StockTwits doubt that the rally will last. One user scoffed at an attempt by CEO Paul Raines to blame the fiscal cliff for GameStop's lousy results.
ToddSullivan: RFLOL... $GME CEO blaming "fiscal cliff" ....cause we all know teenage gamers are Soooo concerned with it.
Others took issue with GameStop's expanding profit margins and the wide net it casts when forecasting its earnings for the year.
PAAResearch: Normally a decline in sales is not a driver of gross margin expansion yet $GME increased gross margins 200 bps. It wasn't all mix. Thoughts?
BrianSozzi: Gamestop has got this guidance thing down cold, toss out a silly large range and see what sticks $GME.
Another user suggested the gains were driven by reports that GameStop sold 1 million copies of "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" on Tuesday, the day the popular game debuted. It also helped that the stock appears to be relatively cheap and is also heavily shorted. So there may have been a squeeze going on as well.
MoonRock: $GME P/E 9.99 w/36+% short float & news http://stks.co/gFHa.


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COVER- Patented medicine: Trail of money follows trail of tears
Baseball legend Lou Gehrig immortalized himself in 1939 as "the luckiest man on the face of this earth." Over 70 years after Gehrig's heart-breaking speech, however, there's precious little luck for sufferers of the fatal disease often bearing his name. However, a local doctor's drug discovery– combined with the an entrepreneurial strategy by an up-and-coming office affiliated with the University of Virginia– may change the outlook for patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
As the drug, dexpramipexole, begins serving up good news for UVA in the form of millions of dollars in licensing and royalty fees, it comes with some painful baggage in the form of 15 ALS patients who saw their access unceremoniously snatched away.
Gatorade to Taxol
The University of Florida has made more than $150 million from Gatorade, the sports drink invented by one of its doctors in 1965. Stanford University continues to live large off of a little invention known as Google. And a cancer drug called Taxol brought Florida State University an estimated $400 million over the last 25 years.
In recent years, UVA has begun seeing glimmers of this kind of "translational" success, when basic research at a university ultimately finds a commercial application with its patent foundation becoming one of America's top licensors. Along the way, however, there's been controversy–- life-altering controversy.
As detailed in the Hook's February 24, 2005 cover story, "She's dying: His drug could save her," a UVA neurologist named James Bennett discovered a compound sitting on the shelf of a German laboratory and theorized that it could lessen some suffering. After testing the compound for eight weeks on mice with no ill effect, Bennett signed up 15 ALS patients in the summer 2004 for a Phase 1 study to determine its safety in humans. The subjects all tolerated the drug with no side effects. They did, however, report that their symptoms seemed to be slowing and even, in some cases, improving.
Patient Mary Jane Gentry, for instance, reported regaining movement in her right hand. Another patient reported being able to articulate a few words– something she hadn't been able to do in months. And others said they'd managed to stand up for the first time in weeks.
The early excitement, however, quickly ran into the rules of medical research where Food and Drug Administration protocols must be followed and where the scientific method trumps any individual's desires. At the end of eight weeks, citing "safety of the research volunteers," UVA officials pulled the plug on the study. A panel claimed the animal testing should have lasted longer and that any positive outcomes were likely manifestations of the "placebo" effect, the power of positive thinking.
Obviously, the move didn't sit well with the terminally ill patients, at least one of whom called the move "inhumane." Mary Jane Gentry, a woman who only months before her diagnosis had been working as a nurse and wielding power tools in home improvement projects, lost her mobility. By early winter 2005, as the disease took its toll, she was confined to a wheelchair. And within months, she was admitted to a nursing home where, she knew, she'd spend her final days.
Five years after his wife began reporting progress in the unceremoniously terminated drug study, Preston Gentry still considers himself angry.
"It was very frustrating," says Preston Gentry. "I think that if a person has a fatal disease, and this is an option that they choose to take, they should be able to sign a waiver and say, 'I'll take the consequences, I won't sue anybody.'"
Ten months after UVA pulled the drug, in September 2005, the FDA granted permission for the original patients to continue taking it on a "compassionate use" basis. But it was too late for Mary Jane Gentry who had died three months earlier.
"I felt like they were playing God," Preston Gentry says of the committee that enforced the rules.
However, if the first patients were dying, the drug would soon find new life.
'Very encouraging' signs
In 2006, with Phase I studies showing it safe for humans, Bennett's drug was licensed by a small Pennsylvania-based pharmaceutical company called Knopp Neurosciences which began shepherding it through larger scale Phase II studies, which began to examine the drug's efficacy.
The results were "very encouraging" says Knopp CEO Dr. Michael Bozik, citing the drug's apparent ability not only to extend life but to extend quality of life by approximately 33 to 50 percent. If the average patient with ALS lives three years beyond diagnosis, that could mean an extra year of time with family– and time to possibly benefit from other research discoveries.
The results were encouraging enough to lure major pharmaceutical company Biogen Idec to invest and take over the costs of the Phase III studies, which are much larger in scale than either Phase I or II, with potentially thousands of research subjects.
As part of the deal announced August 18, Biogen paid $20 million in cash, bought $60 million of Knopp stock, and committed to additional payments of up to $265 million based on results of the future research which will take place around the United States and in several as yet unnamed European companies. If the drug reaches the market, Biogen will also pay "tiered, double-digit royalties" to Knopp on worldwide sales, according to the announcement. All this means that UVA and Dr. Bennett, which have already benefitted financially, will continue to do so.
According to the interim executive director and CEO of the Patent Foundation, that's thanks to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, a federal law which granted permission for publicly funded universities to hold patents and earn royalties but required them to pay the inventors– typically research faculty– a minimum of 15 percent of the royalties and to funnel remaining funds into future research being conducted at the school.
At UVA, inventors receive royalties on a sliding scale. If the school collects under $100,000, the inventor receives 50 percent. That number drops to 30 percent on royalties up to $300,000 and is halved again to 15 percent for royalties of over a million dollars.
At this point, says the interim director Miette Michie, Bennett's drug has already brought the school between $300,000 and $999,000 with Bennett receiving 25 percent of those royalties. Michie declined to provide a copy of the contract between the UVA Patent Foundation and Knopp. Because the Foundation is a nonprofit and is separate from the University, it is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
UVA would undoubtedly win if dexpramipexole were to follow a path similar to the cancer drug Taxol, which is held up in university research circles as the standard bearer of a translational success.
It started back in the mid-1960s when researchers discovered that the bark of the Pacific Yew– a scrubby, slow-growing tree native to the West Coast– contained cancer fighting properties. The problem: extracting the active ingredient would require decimating the tree population. However, one of those early researchers– Robert Holton– working about a decade later at Florida State University– discovered a way to synthesize the active molecule. The laboratory-made drug– Taxol– became one of the most effective and successful cancer treatments in medical history, with annual sales peaking at $1.6 billion in 2000. Florida state reaped more than $400 million in royalties–- including $67 million in 2000 alone–- before the patent expired. Holton became a rich man– albeit one who continued to work full time as a researcher.
Cashing in?
The subject of medical researchers and universities getting rich off research is a sensitive one, particularly since human test subjects are involved and the risk for ethical conflicts are high. But the Patent Foundation's Michie defends researchers against anyone who would claim they're too eager to cash in.
"Faculty do not become faculty if they're money hungry," says Michie, citing the fact that other career paths are typically more lucrative than most professorships. Still, she acknowledges that offering a generous royalty schedule is one way to attract top talent and a way to encourage faculty in all departments– not just the school of medicine– to seek ways to market their research.
Gentry also says he has no problem with the prospect of Dr. Bennett getting wealthy.
"I know how much time Dr. Bennett put in with Mary Jane," he says. "If this turns out to be a good drug, he shouldn't have to worry about anything the rest of his life, as far as I'm concerned."
Gentry is less pleased at the idea of UVA reaping financial rewards after denying his wife the drug even as she and others begged for access.
"The University is riding on his coattails," he says of Bennett. "They get the free ride, he's doing the work."
The UVA Patent Foundation, an independent nonprofit that is the safekeeper of much of UVA's intellectual property, has seen its ranks grow from just three employees a decade ago to 20 currently on staff. And the school has created a new high level administrative position dedicated solely to bolstering researchers' ability to market their inventions.Mark Crowell, UVA's executive director and associate vice president for innovation partnerships and commercialization– a position created this year– points out that without the University's involvement, many discoveries made by faculty would never see any commercial success. Recently, the Patent Foundation announced that on an adjusted basis in 2007, UVA ranked fourth in "deal flow" and second in "invention disclosures" among its peer institutions.
"One of the things I will be undertaking is to be a bit more aggressive at reaching out within the institution," says Crowell, noting that many professors aren't even aware of the potential to patent and commercialize their research– and medicine is not the only area such possibilities exist.
"I'm kind of a scientific matchmaker– a yenta," jokes Crowell, recalling one of his favorite commercial successes while he was doing similar work at University of North Carolina: a web-based course developed in the language department to teach health care workers how to communicate with Spanish speaking patients.
"Most people would tell you, you don't do this because it makes you rich," says Crowell, again pointing out that all revenue that comes into the University is reinvested in research. "You can't go buy the president an airplane or invest in a stadium," he says.
All the talk about money and about who deserves it or doesn't at UVA may be premature anyway, according to one of the country's leading ALS researchers, Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Rothstein– who is overseeing a dexpramipexole trial at his site– says dexpramipexole isn't the first ALS drug that's shown promise in Phase II studies, and history suggests it's dangerous to raise hopes up before the final Phase III studies are complete.
"When Riluzole was first discovered, it had remarkable efficacy in Phase II studies," says Rothstein, citing the only medication currently available for ALS patients. But in the end, while Riluzole was eventually approved and is frequently prescribed, it has only a "very slight efficacy," says Rothstein.
Bozik agrees, and says Riluzole's only effect is a slight increase in life span–- several months at most–- without any corresponding increase in quality of life.
"It's never been shown to have benefit of strength or motor function," says Bozik, adding that dexpramipexole has shown the potential to both extend life and slow progression of symptoms. "It's about keeping patients walking, talking, breathing and eating, longer and better."
Bozik says Knopp will remain involved in the Phase III studies, but thanks to the deal with Biogen, the company will now focus on studying why the drug works in hopes of further developing a treatment with the goal of turning ALS into a chronic disease that one can live comfortably with for years– as various medications have done for HIV/AIDS, which was essentially a death sentence in the 1980s, the early days of its identification.
Rothstein also believes that the greatest hope for ALS sufferers may lie not in a medication but in gene therapy. Already, a trial exists in which researchers are attempting to "turn off" a gene that has been associated with some ALS cases.
Other researchers are testing already existing drugs used to treat other illnesses to see if they might have an effect on ALS. Currently, Rothstein says, researchers are looking at an antibiotic called cephtriaxone that has shown some promise in laboratory models.
"We need trials in ALS, we need to keep taking shots on goal," says Rothstein, urging restraint before believing any drug currently being studied could be a magic bullet for ALS. "No matter how excited we are," he says, "I've done enough trials to know that I'll know when the trial is over."
Dr. Bennett now serves as the Chair of the Neurology Department and a founding director of a Parkinson's clinic at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical School (formerly MCV) as he prepares to conduct new research on dexpramipexole's possible efficacy in treating Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, says he's delighted to see the ALS research moving forward with continued promise.
"I was very hopeful that this day would come," he says. "I couldn't be more thrilled about this outcome."
UVA will hold the patent on the use of dexpramipexole in ALS for 20 years– the maximum allowed by law– but Bennett's future studies on other applications for the compound will be patented by VCU.
Biogen expects to commence the Phase III studies in early 2011, according to Bozik, but even if all goes well, it will be a couple of years at the soonest before the compound becomes widely available. For the patients involved in the early study at UVA, who first described positive results back in 2004–- before having the drug taken away from them by a UVA ethics board–- it's too late. All 15 have died.
But for the estimated 30,000 Americans currently suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and all those who will be diagnosed in the future, the news is a beacon of hope for a disease with an otherwise hopeless prognosis.
Gentry, who remarried to his high school sweetheart several years after Mary Jane's death, says he has high hopes that the drug his late wife believed in lives up to her expectations, even though she's not here to benefit from it.
"Mary Jane would be right out there in the front," he says, "right behind Dr. Bennett 100 percent."
6 comments
The roylatys should be used for subsidizing tuition or indigent medical care not marble granite and commissioned paintings. UVA wastes so much money on grandiose items.
This, will get messy
there is a lot of blame placed on FDA, yet it is often the industry, specifically Biogen, that takes forever to roll out the actual product. They have back burnered many good drugs in the past and lost billions in sales. It is hard to choose the winner from the thousands of patents filed. More than likely this drug will also turn out to be a dead end with no great royalties coming in to UVA. Everyone is so quick to want the money for themselves or program, but 100% should be put into medical research at this doctors choice, since he is likely to find more drugs for other diseases, but no doubt even after this notariety, he probably can't get funding for his next ideas and battles for grant money while UVA builds sport stadiums and snobby students whine about the tuition cost of their art degree all while protesting the low wages for janitors, unaware that they will make about the same at graduation. Don't mix the royalties if any with the general funds, put it back to save more lives.
It's great to read the comments of experts who just know that successful pharmceutical companies really don't know their business, and know equally well how other successful entities should spend their money.
I stand in awe of your brilliance.
I claim no brilliance, simply insight from researching. Biogen sold off Angiomax for very cheap and now the medicines company sells over a billion dollars a year world wide, Victor Kiam thought Velcro was interesting but not useful. My point is is that even good ideas can be slow to market (angiomax was delayed a decade by Biogen persuing other drugs and back burnering the Angiomax, it is actually a very interesting case as the medicines company missed a filing deadline for a patent by a mailing mix up by one day which the patent office allowed but the FDA didn't, costing this successful company $13 million in lobbist payouts all over waiting for the last day to file a simple extension. Far from organized, this bussiness is a real soap opera of mishaps and political whims that often leave the scientists and Universities with little.)
So Micheal Jordon was picked behind 3 other people in the 84 draft, not everyone has a future telling ability, and Biogen is no different. Each drug is a big gamble and may or may not pan out. My concern from this story is the dreamy money discussed that may or may not come true and everyone at UVA thinks how to use this "free" money in lean times. I am sure there are many programs in need of some more money, perhaps all. Just remember that medical research is what all these cancer walks and charity drives are for, to give scientists money to research possible cures since corporate companies can not afford to lose money on basic research or unproven leads. That is my point.
I have been informed by persons smarter than myself, a large group, that royalties not paid out to inventors or used for legal and operating expenses are put back into various research related projects at the university, not in the general funding.
Biogen is likely to find parrallel inventions that might be better medically and make the current patent not valuable, it tends to have multiple patents on the same subject area each with a little change in the configurations. No telling which one will have the right receptors.
In either case, those looking for lower tuitions from any of this are out of luck. Better of working on a Gaitoraide substitute with out Fructose..Cavilaide..just a hollow empty nicely decorated bottle that looks cool with no substance inside.


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1-1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 cup peanut butter
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Preheat oven to 375º. Sift together dry ingredients; set aside. Cream together butter and peanut butter and sugars. Add in egg and vanilla; mix until combined. Stir in flour. Scoops about 24-26 cookies. Place cookies on lightly greased baking sheets. Bake for 15-18 minutes.


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NAWBO-IE Amazing Women Event 2013
National Association of Women's Business Owners - Inland Empire Chapter
Thursday, April 18, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT)
Event Details
Amazing Women Event
NAWBO-IE's 10th Annual Amazing Women of the Inland Empire
Awards & Scholarship Banquet
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Eagle Glen Golf Club
1800 Eagle Glen Parkway
Corona, CA 92883
Join us in recognizing amazing women business owners in the Inland Empire for their contributions as trailblazers, rising stars, community bridge builders and legacy makers. These women are true diamonds in our own backyard. NAWBO-IE will also be awarding scholarships to future women business owners who are enrolled in accredited colleges and universities.
This is NAWBO-IE's signature event and you don't want to miss it. Come network and advertise your business, connect with influential decision-makers and corporate sponsors, learn from incredibly successful business owners, enjoy a meaningful night out with friends and family, and of course, recognize the outstanding achievements of women in the Inland Empire's business community.
The 2013 AWE nominees were nominated by their peers:
Legacy Award --Kathy McAdara, Operation Safehouse; Ana Dimic, Dimic Steel Tech; Kara Lubin, 100 Mile Club
Community Bridge Builder Award -- Annette Durham, 7-11/Community Activist; Dawn Meade Duffy, Girl Scouts San Grogonia Council; Gina Elise, Pin-Ups for Vets; Dorothy Wolons, Menifee Chamber of Commerce
Rising Star -- Kathy Walsh, Business Waste Management; Lori Marruffo, Virtual Outsourcing Solutions; Dr. Sofia Castro, Temecula Family Chiropractic; Yolanda Mason, YMM Media.
Business Woman of the Year -- Pom Intra, Prima Marketing Inc.; Monique Suraci, Murrieta Day Spa; Rebecca Grammer-Ybarra/Christiana Grammer, Suite 106 Cupcakery; Kim Carter, Time for Change.
Trailblazer -- Shayne Voorheis, Shayne and Company; Denise Wilson, Desert Jet; Terry Oelrich, Reverse Control; Dian Wyman, Wyman and Little, Inc.
Join us as we honor the "Amazing Women" of the Inland Empire!
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Eagle Glen Golf Club
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Thursday, April 18, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT)
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Well the mystery has been solved. I have found a birth record for Sarah Mitchell who was the wife of Benjamin Foss. I found the record in the Vital Records of Brunswick, Maine. I ended up looking in these records due to a lead in the book Old Kittery and Her Families.
When Israel passed away Mary (Berry) Mitchell remarried Joseph Getchell in 1750. In 1765 both the Foss and Getchell families moved to Machias. When the history of the town was written it was probably assumed that Sarah was Joseph's daughter. Furthermore, Benjamin Foss and Sarah Mitchell were married in 1762. If she was the daughter of Joseph Getchell she would have been born after 1750. This would have made her 12 years or younger when Benjamin and Sarah got married. This would have been highly unlikely. The only record I was missing was a birth record to prove whose daughter Sarah was. Below is the information from the Vital Records. Interestingly, neither John or Sarah were recorded in the baptism records in Records of the First Congregational Church in Scarborough, Maine. However, some of Israel and Mary's other children were recorded, which included Mary who was born on May 17th, 1736.
Israel Mitchel and Mary Mitchel and his wife
–1 their Daughter Mary Mitchel was born May 17th 1736
–2 John Mitchel son of Israel Mitchel and Mary and his wife was born October the 22th 1739
–3 Sarah Mitchel Daughter of Israel Mitchel and Mary and his wife was Born Jully the 9th 1742
Anderson, J. C. (2004). Vital records of Brunswick, Maine, 1740-1860 and the Forsaith book of Brunswick family records, compiled 1876-1880 by Jonathan W. Forsaith, town clerk (p. 24). Rockport, ME: Picton Press.


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After falling to #10 LSU on Friday in their first NCAA tournament game, the Central Connecticut softball team put on a redeeming show, topping the Northwestern State Lady Demons (40-15, 18-7 SLC) by a score of 9-1 on Saturday for their first NCAA tournament victory. In the win, the Blue Devils (36-14, 16-4 NEC) posted their sixth-consecutive game with at least one home run and sophomore Laura Messina earned her 50th career win.
WATCH highlights from the game!
Messina pitched all seven innings for the Blue Devils. She faced 27 batters, walking only two and striking out three. She allowed just three hits and her record improves to 28-10 on the season. The sophomore increased her CCSU career win record to 50.
In the top of the first, junior Arielle Bruno followed up yesterday's impressive homer by scoring the first run of the game against NSU. She reached base on a walk, stole second and crossed the plate on a double to left field by senior Nicole Springer, her 13th of the season. Springer scored on a rip up the middle by junior Tessa Brown with two outs to increase the Blue Devil lead to two.
Central added two more before the half-inning's end when a single from freshman Eileen Purcell brought in Brown and freshman Evie Rentzel to increase the lead to four. The Blue Devils headed into the bottom of the first with a 4-0 lead.
In the bottom of the first, Rentzel and freshman Hannah Cooper put forth extraordinary efforts to snag two balls in foul territory. The Lady Demons were able to get a runner to third, but she was stranded after Messina registered her first strikeout of the game.
The Blue Devils struck again in the top of the second, adding three more runs to the board. Bruno sent a shot deep to right center that was just inches from making it over the wall, landing her on third for her first triple of the season. With just one out on the board, sophomore Kat Malcolm laid down a well-placed bunt to score Bruno and increase the Blue Devil lead to five.
A single by Springer, her second consecutive hit of the game, drove Malcolm in to increase the lead to six and was followed by a shot over the third baseman to send Springer across the plate. Messina took to the circle in the bottom of the second with a seven run cushion.
Central added one more run to its commanding lead in the top of the fifth. Freshman Hannah Cooper blasted a double to left and was replaced on base by freshman Katie Schmidt. Schmidt was advanced by Bruno and plated by Malcolm to notch the Blue Devils' eighth run.
Freshman shortstop Eileen Purcell, who made several impressive diving plays throughout the game, sent a homer over the left field wall in the top of the seventh to add another run to the board for Central and notch her third home run of the season.
The Blue Devils posted 10 hits on the day, including four extra base hits. The Lady Demons posted just three hits on the day.
With the win, CCSU earns another opportunity to continue competition for the NCAA Regional Championship. The Blue Devils will face LSU for the second time this weekend to battle for the chance to go to the championship game on Sunday against UL-Lafayette.
The first pitch for tonight's game vs. LSU is scheduled for 7:05 p.m. (6:05 p.m. CDT). Fans can watch the game live on LSUsports.net GeauxZone HERE. Blue Devil fans can also follow all of the action via LIVE STATS and on Twitter @CCSUBlueDevils.


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From Beth:
I really find this whole discussion to be rather hilarious…
Let me explain, I'm a xian. Indeed, I am a grad student of theology. Did Bible College… the whole bit. And I also absolutely love CoFSM. I promoted it around the College, and even hosted a pirate day there (though most people didn't know ALL they were celebrating…). I am in total sympathy with the fact that ID does not belong in science class. I love the "parody", and the satire is killer.
What is hilarious? That Xians say ridiculous, dumb things about other people's beliefs (or lack thereof), and feel all superior and cool for that, and yet, what is the difference here? It's like everyone gets a kick out of telling everyone else that they are stupid. Nice. Well done Christians. Well done Atheists. May you all eternally enjoy throwing around hate mail and tired rhetoric.
And may the noodly appendage touch you all.


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June 26, 2014
By Nicole Williams
Contributing Writer
Add one part Vegas, two parts battle of the sexes, four parts couples and one part wedding and you'll get "Think Like A Man Too." The romantic comedy is a sequel to "Think Like A Man," which was based on Steve Harvey's New York Times best-selling book "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man."
The big screen sequel pulls out all the stops going above and beyond the first movie comically, for a side splitting good time. The hilarious, fun and heartbreaking sequel brought the audience on an adventure through the lives of five couples, well four, if you discount the split relationship between Cedric, who is played by Kevin Hart and his wife Gail and La La Anthony who plays the solo friend, Sonia. The movie was directed by Tim story and produced by Will Packer who says that the sequel differs from the first film.
"The first film was definitely a romantic comedy. It was about building relationships," Packer said. "This one is an out-and-out romp, as they try to literally, survive the weekend in Vegas."
The movie centered on the highly anticipated wedding between Candace, played by Regina Hall and Michael, played by Terrence J and of course, the bachelor/bachelorette escapades that really brought the notion of "Vegas" to life. But amidst the sometimes stressful preparations were the normal jitters of any relationship. When is the right time to start a family? Are we ready to commit? What's next? The movie really explored those questions as we see the nature of each characters true personality come out. Cedric, who is played by Kevin Hart, really became the center of attention as he tries to be "the best man in the history of best men." But it's Vegas, so as you can imagine it takes us on an adventure that can sometimes not go as planned. Mya who is played by Meagan Good discovers Zeke played by Romany Malco has a past that no girlfriend wants to hear. Sonia, played by La La Anthony is the best friend to Mya, who is loyal and supportive. She says filming in Vegas brought some interesting elements to the movie.
"It's Vegas, so you never know what to expect," Anthony said.
The ambitious duo, Lauren and Dominic played by Taraji P. Henson and Michael Ealy also face their own questions as career battles love. Of course we know the battle of the Momma's Boy, Michael and the mother-in-law from hell, Ms. Loretta, played by Jenifer Lewis. She provides a battle throughout the movie, as she tries to stay in control of the eventful trip.
Then there were the happily married couple and the Newlyweds. Bennett the fanny-pack toting happy-go-lucky man who is played by comedian Gary Owen and his wife, Tish, played by Wendi McLendon-Covey are the happily married conservative couple, or at least that's how they appear. Like previously mentioned, Vegas tends to turn things up a notch. Kristen and Jeremy, played by Gabrielle Union and Jerry Ferrara are the newlyweds of the group who are challenged with the question, "When should we start a family?"
The cast agrees that it was a blast working with each other for a part two.
"To be paid to hang out with your friends, I don't know anybody who would have turned that deal down. We just genuinely enjoy each other," Gabrielle Union said.
Hart also agrees that working with the cast was a "bonus."
"Having the same cast is a bonus, you know? We're not co-workers – we're friends. Almost family," he said.
The romantic comedy opened in theaters June 20, 2014.


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The biscuits are set out with cool butter, cranberry-orange marmalade and strong coffee from a French press.
The pastry melts on the tongue, save for the crispy biscuit bottom and its delicate crunch. The marmalade is tart-sweet; the butter is creamy.
A sip of rich, dark coffee and I'm left sans biscuit and with an annoying whisper from my conscience. Mind your manners.
"I'm not sure these biscuits are any good," I say, con-science be damned. "I best try another."
Judy laughs. She knows a line when she hears it. She likely also knows her biscuits are gold.
Judy Schultz is one of the country's finest food writers. Hell, she's one of Canada's finest writers, period.
For years I was in awe of her. Still am, really. Judy's writing carried me off to distant lands and so filled my senses with exotic aromas and flavours I craved things I couldn't pronounce.
Now I'm at her house and checking out the spacious office where it all gets done. Her laptop sits on a vintage Chinese desk, surrounded by shelves of books organized by country and cuisine.
She has written mostly about food. But Mamie's Children, nominated for the Governor General's Award, was a memoir and Freddy's War a work of fiction.
In all, she's written or co-authored more than a dozen books. As readers of the Edmonton Journal know, Judy worked at the paper for years. Now she writes what she wants and for whom she wants.
Her Sherwood Park home is absolutely indistinct from the street. An iron gate opens into a small cloister and then it's up the steps and into Ed and Judy's home.
They built the house 43 years ago and added to it over the years. We start in the backyard, which backs onto a golf course. The tall trees and foliage are dense enough that only stray Titleists betray the goings-on behind the property.
The backyard was once all grass and playground for the two Schultz boys. But once the kids were dispatched into the world, Ed and Judy converted the space into a shrub and flower garden with paths to wander and places to sit.
Betwixt home and yard is a bright, comfy sun room, created from what was once a deck. Just inside is the dining room, created from what was once the family room.
Next to it is another realm where Judy creates magic - the kitchen. Judy designed it, yet is bothered by one issue, the gap in the horseshoe counter.
Apparently, guests feel they must wander into her sacred cooking realm to help out.
"It's a one-person kitchen," she says.
By the way, Judy swears by her KitchenAid, as well as her dual-fuel range.
Just off the kitchen is the former dining room, now used as a more formal sitting area. It looks down into a sunken living room, which Judy shrugs off as an artifact of mid-century design.
That it may be. But to this artifact of the mid-century, it looks like the perfect place to watch Hockey Night in Canada and eat Kraft Dinner and wieners off a TV table.
Judy says the house was one of the first on the street and in what was then a rural subdivision.
"We're both from small towns and Sherwood Park still has that feel," Judy says.
Just off the kitchen and down one hall is the master bedroom. No ensuite.
In fact, the facilities across the hall are rather utilitarian compared to the richly decorated W.C. off the guest room.
Down another hall from the kitchen is Judy's office, with its large windows looking out on the gorgeous backyard.
These days, Judy is writing a blog - Judyink.ca - as well as magazine articles. She's also planning a book, roughly titled: Shorts Stories About How to Murder Someone in the Kitchen.
Ed, who for 33 years was general manager of the Alberta Pork Producers, seems unconcerned by the title. Apparently, he's learned to avoid the kitchen.
Judy says she often writes to music - jazz or blues - played very quietly. Ed often wanders into her 500-square-foot office to sit and read while she writes.
"But if he makes too much noise he has to leave," says Judy with a laugh.
Which is my cue.
As I wander out I remember there are still biscuits left uneaten.
But for once, I mind my manners.
Scott can be reached at email@example.com for comments or suggestions for future features on unique or beautiful homes in the Edmonton region.
An invitation into beloved food writer's inner sanctum
The biscuits are set out with cool butter, cranberry-orange marmalade and strong coffee from a French press.